Legal precedent is changing, and ADA compliance related lawsuits are becoming more successful, and the courts are seeing more of them as a result. Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act pertains to private sector businesses. Lately, those protections are more frequently expanding into digital territory as web and mobile applications become more necessary in our day-to-day lives.
This is an article that most other website developers probably don’t want you to read. The reason is that most other web designers basically like to think of themselves as all-powerful wizards with magical powers. And they use complex technical jargon and terminology to intimidate and mystify their clients into thinking that what they do is more complex than it is.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was instituted in 1990 in an effort to end discrimination based on differing abilities. Drawing heavily from the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which established protections against discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin, the ADA went a step further by requiring organizations to provide “reasonable accommodations” to employees with disabilities.
The fastest, most certain way to be sure your website is in compliance is to contact a qualified web design agency and have them perform an audit of all your online properties. Make sure you interview the agency thoroughly first, as not all agencies are up to speed on ADA website compliance rules. A qualified web design firm will be able to identify any violations of ADA Website Compliance and outline a plan for updating your online content and properties.

I am struggling with this right now. Alt text, captions, audio (read to me) options are good. I work with an accounting software app that redesigned its palette to red, black, and gray. No green to signify income. Made no sense to me and their gray text (also very skinny sans serif) made reading many nav bars difficult. Some URLs are accessible from the build-out, but the DIY sites often don't have the same capacity. As with secure sites, I think google will be downgrading those sites with little or no compliance or accessibility add-ons.

This guy is right on! You should learn new skills that are critical to your success instead of focusing on your business. Just making a website is easy, making one that is easy for your users to navigate, captures your users' interactions, feed that back to a CRM so you can act on it and setting up automation to handle each one properly so you don't lose the customer is not. (And do not forget, the design of your site is critical to the effectiveness of Google and Microsoft Ads. Without them, no one will ever see your new, beautiful site.)
“Any business that is considered a “place of public accommodation” is required to provide equal access to services under the nondiscrimination requirements of Title III of ADA. When you look at the guidelines closely, this includes hotels, entertainment venues, legal and accounting firms, retail stores, and virtually every business that is not a private club, including businesses that exist solely on the web.” (Read full article.)
Gray Reed & McGraw is a Texas-based, full-service law firm with over 120 lawyers in Dallas and Houston. Since 1985, our firm philosophy has been to provide high-quality legal services in a streamlined manner, to provide sophisticated and complex legal advice that is reasonably priced, and to provide big-firm results with small-firm efficiency. For 30 years, we have dedicated ourselves to achieving success for our clients, as they define success – whether that is winning a critical lawsuit, closing a key deal, consulting to save taxes, or just giving good business advice to avoid disputes.

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Over 10,ooo business owners were sued this year (2019) and they expect that # to increase to over 100,000 in 2020. And these are no-joke lawsuits. They settled for $20k - $6million, average was $50k...crippling to most small business owners, and you can't win these cases. Unlike GDPR, the ADA law doesn't require any notice before a lawsuit can be filed for non-compliance, and it doesn't provide any time for a company to take positive or corrective action before its filed, so there's no real defense. It's basically just a race to see who wins...the site owner that protects his or herself, or the dirty lawyer that finds them before they did. Getting sued is a REAL risk, not the usual fake scare we usually see that disappears over time.
If you do get sued, if you immediately remediate your website, you may be able to get the lawsuit dismissed on mootness (there’s no longer anything in dispute, i.e. plaintiffs are arguing your website is inaccessible but you’ve already made it accessible). This definitely does not mean you should wait to fix your website but it does mean you may have an out.
People with disabilities may use a number of special tools to interact with websites such as: screen readers, speech recognition software, touch screen devices, captioning devices (for video content), Braille, screen magnifiers, alternative keyboard devices, and head pointers. It is important to make sure your website complies with standards that make it possible for those with diverse disabilities to successfully interact with your website.

Most recently, however, pizza chain Domino's has been brought under suit for their website not being accessible for specialty ordering. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case, instead upholding the decision of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who said the “alleged inaccessibility of Domino’s website and app impedes access to the goods and services of its physical pizza franchises—which are places of public accommodation.”

The DOJ is currently working to release new technical standards for digital accessibility. The latter updates to the ADA guidelines will be in conjunction with the latest version of WCAG 2.1, which includes the most widely accepted digital accessibility requirements across the globe. If organizations want to overcome the current limitations of ADA guidelines, then they should follow the WCAG 2.1 checklist,11 as well as the suggestions provided by the ADA. The latter two steps, combined with the help of a trusted digital accessibility compliance platform,12 can help organizations achieve digital accessibility best in class standards throughout all of their digital formats and across all media.

That’s good news if you are one of the many Americans who have a visual, hearing, or mobility disability that makes it difficult to access some information on the web. If you are a business owner who hasn’t made provisions to ensure that your website and other online assets are ADA compliant, you could be looking at a host of legal and financial penalties.
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For federal institutions, Section 508 makes it very clear that all federal-related websites must be accessible to all individuals, with and without disabilities. For private commercial websites, the Department of Justice (DOJ), which enforces the ADA, has made it clear that it interprets the ADA as applicable to websites. In 2010, the DOJ issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to specifically ensure all websites, public and private, are subject to ADA compliance. The DOJ’s proposed amendments to the ADA were initially expected in Spring of 2016 but have now been pushed back to 2018.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established the main international standards and accessibility for the World Wide Web. The WCAG is created by the W3C to provide a standard for web content accessibility that can be shared around the world. The WCAG is meant to accompany organizations as a sort of blueprint on how to make their websites ADA compliant.
It isn’t a problem by default, a lot of it comes down to how it is built. I’d suggest either considering a highly accessible contingency option, or build those components in such a way that there is a level of accessibility baked into it. If you need help with that testing or review email us at questions at yokoco.com and we’ll be able to let you know the cost for us to lend a hand.
The ADA is the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed almost 30 years ago in 1990. This act was originally put in motion pertaining solely to physical location. It requires establishments to provide people with disabilities easy access to various levels throughout the business. This act was set to achieve an equal experience to all people, handicapped or not.